From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 3/11/2006 4:04 PM
Poison in the air

When a sinister illness hit schoolchildren and their teachers in war-torn Chechnya in December, doctors were convinced it was a case of poisoning. Then the government came up with its own diagnosis - mass hysteria. Is there an official cover-up going on? Anna Politkovskaya reports
Anna Politkovskaya
Wednesday March 1, 2006

Guardian
Awar has been raging in the north Caucasian Republic of Chechnya in the Russian Federation since November 1994. Over the years, officials in Moscow have given the war various names. Sometimes it is called "putting the region in order"; since the beginning of the international "anti-terrorist" era, it has become a "counter-terrorist operation". But it is never called a war, despite the fact that an estimated 70,000-200,000 Russian military personnel are conducting operations as if on enemy territory. The civilian population has taken the brunt of the military impact. For the past 12 years, those living and working in Chechnya have been aware that federal forces were testing new types of weapons. The story of what happened in the Shelkovsk district is simply the biggest such case.

In December last year, there were reports of mass poisonings at schools in the Shelkovsk region. Just before new year, a government commission published its official verdict: there was no need to worry - there were no poisonings, it was mass psychosis due to stress. But did anyone in Chechnya believe these explanations?

On a bed by a wall in room one of Shelkovsk regional hospital a young woman called Sina is having a seizure. Her face is white, then yellow, then bright red; her brother unclenches her teeth with a spoon in order to pull out her tongue while her mother lies on top of her to control the spasms. The girl is now bent in an impossible arch, her heels touching the back of her head.

It is January 6, a third week has gone by, and there is no improvement in her condition. Aset (Sina) Magamshapieva is not a pupil at the school where most of the victims came from. A 20-year-old student teacher, she had gone there for some teaching practice. An elderly nurse arrives with a syringe. The fit has lasted 15 minutes already. The nurse is alone, taking care of 40 patients, and has just been dealing with Marina Tereshchenko in a neighbouring room. Marina has been suffering from similar seizures.

What is in the syringe? "Analgin [an analgesic] and dimedrol [a sedative]," she sighs. But that can't really help, can it? "We don't have anything else," she says. "What can we treat them with? Analgin will at least take the pain away from the spasms, and dimedrol will quieten them down, let them sleep after the fits ..."

Rabadan Ahmethanovich Rabadanov, deputy chief of therapeutics, arrives. He looks at Aset sadly. A sedative is introduced into a vein, and soon tears start to flow down her cheeks. It is the 47th minute of the seizure. Though the girl sees and hears no one, she noticeably starts breathing again. "Tears mean that the seizure is passing," says her mother.

How often do such fits occur? "Three to four times a day. We almost broke her teeth to keep her from swallowing her tongue," her mother says. "I'm in such torment, and she's exhausted by all the fits ... If they could just find out what they were poisoned with, even if they don't tell anyone, just tell us how to treat it ... How long are they going to keep this up?"

Vaha Dardayevich Ehselayev, chief physician at the hospital, is sitting in his office. "We are the doctors who were with these victims from the start," he says, "and we will not change our diagnosis - an intoxication of unknown aetiology. How could it be hysterics or mass psychosis?" A tired Rabadanov enters. Together with Dr Jamilya Halilovna Aliyeva, he was the first to be called to the school in the village of Starogladovsk on December 16 after reports of children collapsing unconscious. "Every child had psycho-motor excitation, hallucinations and some kind of strange laughter," Rabadanov recalls. "Severe spasms. Nothing seemed to help. We gave sedatives and anti-convulsives. But the spasms just kept repeating. I am certain that such a number of children could never enter a state of psycho-motor excitation simply from hysterics. It was some kind of agent. If these were merely hysterical fits, as the commission says, then they would be easy to isolate."

Ehselayev interrupts: "I think that if this was a mass psychosis spread by rumours and the media, then the first to react would have been the 80-plus schizophrenics and as many epileptics we have in the region. But they had no such reaction. We checked. I believe that there is a poisonous agent in the victims' schools. But the political situation is such that it has to be denied. We don't know what the agent was. We don't have the resources to find out." At the hospital there is not a single computer and no internet access; none of the doctors who encountered this unprecedented phenomenon could put out an SOS on the web.

So what next? "We don't know. A dead end." What are they treating? "Only the symptoms. If there are spasms we give an anti-convulsive. If there is pain we give an analgesic. But the fits continue. We have requested, and continue to request, some kind of a treatment plan. But no one is rushing to bring us one. The commissions from Moscow and Grozny were here and told the patients, 'Don't fake.' But how could they? We were alone with them. The agent acting on them is some kind of toxic substance which makes the nervous system hypersensitive. The fits can be summoned by the creak of a door or the rustle of a packet. This doesn't fit any known disease picture."

The relatives of the victims, just like the majority of the local inhabitants, are sure that the source of the infection was the women's toilet in the Starogladovsk school. All the victims at one time or another were there. It was clear that whoever went to the toilet had the most serious symptoms, while those who were nearby had fewer. The doctors insist it is a toxic substance, most likely a solid, but capable of propagation in a gas wave, one that loses its potency in direct proportion to the distance from the source. The same picture is repeated in the Shelkovsk and Shelkozavodsk schools.

The strict localisation of the sick people by school, time and place is the determining detail in this picture of a massive disease outbreak. At Shelkozavodsk, for example, only those who were on the school building's first floor became ill. Those who did not come to school that day are still healthy.